Tides (16 page)

Noah gagged on his bite of smooth, buttery risotto. “Seals?” He thanked whatever luck he had left that his voice didn’t break.

The professor nodded. “You might remember, a few years ago, all the stories that were circulating about sharks: how they never get cancer, how certain of their hormones mimic antioxidants, how even their skin cells can ward off carcinogens?”

Noah nodded, feeling grateful for all the weekends he’d spent in the UNH library instead of out with his friends—not that his friends had ever been much for going out, either. His thoughts turned to the Oceanic’s Midsummer party, and Mara. Just because he was new at this, he reminded himself, didn’t mean he was entirely destined for failure.

Focus.
“I remember, sir.”

“Well, unfortunately, shark DNA is too differentiated from our own to be much use to us in treating human cancers. But there are all manner of wonders in the marine world, as you are of course aware. What we really need is an animal with closer evolutionary ties to human beings.” He tapped one long finger on the table. “A marine mammal. A seal, for instance.”

“More like humans.” Noah felt his face grow cool and damp. He wasn’t sure he wanted to eat any more.

“Exactly.” Professor Foster looked past Noah, already caught up in the stream of his own thoughts. “Did you know that several cultures even tell stories of seals that can shed their skins and turn human? Irish, Scottish, Icelandic, Faroese . . . Their lore is remarkably similar.”

He glanced away, then back at Noah. “I can tell you, if you like.”

Noah took a breath. “I’m sure it’s fascinating.”

Professor Foster smiled. “It’s well enough.” He looked away again, at the ceiling—at nothing, as far as Noah could tell.

“There’s always this man, a lord, or sometimes a prosperous tradesman, a fisherman. His town is by the sea, of course. These stories always come from coastal communities.

“One day the lord finds a sealskin on the beach. It’s large and beautiful, and he takes it with him, thinking he could make a coat of it or some such thing. But as he walks home, he begins to hear soft footsteps behind him.

“He turns and sees this gorgeous woman standing there, staring at him, with more love in her simple dark eyes than he’d ever seen in a human woman’s—not that he wanted for female company, powerful as he was. But this woman, she looks at him as if he’s her god.

“So he invites her to come home with him. She does, and they marry, and soon they have children.” Professor Foster stopped for a moment, thinking. “They have beautiful children, and they love them. The lord always keeps the sealskin in his chest, to remember the day he met his wife—his true love, what have you.” He waved a hand absentmindedly and cleared his throat. “But one day, one of the children is going through the lord’s chest, and he finds the skin. He brings it to his mother and asks her what it is.

“The woman snatches the skin from her child’s hands and runs, never so much as looking back. She’s lost to the sea—a seal-woman, a selkie. She abandons her husband and children, just like that. She leaves them. They never hear from her again.”

The professor’s fingernail tapped an erratic ting against his empty wineglass. “So. The moral of the story. If you find a sealskin, you damn well hold on to it. Even those primitive cultures knew sealskins were precious, life-changing.” He took a breath. “The end.”

Noah realized he’d been staring at his fork. He exhaled, slowly, carefully, and looked up. He wondered if the selkie stories would follow him wherever he went now. He wondered if Professor Foster had ever heard another version.

He was suddenly desperate to change the subject. “What kind of dog do you have, Professor?”

“Oh.” He frowned. “She’s just a mutt. I adopted her.”

“That’s nice.” Noah tried to smile.

He shrugged. “She needed a home.”

Noah nodded absently. Professor Foster’s version of the story had disturbed him—had frightened him, even. How could he take the fisherman’s side? But Professor Foster was a man Noah had wanted to work with for years—a good man. He just knew the wrong version of the story.

He heard another thump upstairs.

“Damn it!” Professor Foster dropped his fork. “The stupid bitch is always knocking over my furniture.” He stood up. “Next time I’m going purebred.” He chuckled.

Noah listened to him walk upstairs again, then heard another smack, another warning. The dog was silent.

When Professor Foster came back downstairs, his face was grim, but he smiled when he saw Noah. “Now let’s start talking about the projects I can give you. I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

Noah wished he could say the same.

twenty-four

R
ONAN
shoved his sealskin down his hips and tugged on the human clothes Maebh had given him. They belonged to that boy—Noah—and they were much too narrow and long for him. They smelled like the big building on Appledore and all its dead fish and strange chemicals. His biceps bulged in Noah’s constricting sleeves, and Ronan had to roll up the jeans’ cuffs.

“Pathetic,” he huffed, flexing his arms and hearing the shirt’s seams rip. He knotted his dreadlocks with a loose strip of cotton he tore from one of the sleeves. He rolled the pant cuffs once more, wishing they weren’t so tight around his calves.

He watched the humans leave the Center one by one. Mara said they’d leave early today for the idiotic human ceremony she was going to on Star. Ronan clenched his fists. The way humans danced, it was practically sacrilege. They had little grace and no focus, and it seemed they danced only to impress one another. He couldn’t imagine why Mara would want to join them, unless it had something to do with the skinny, weakling human whose clothes he’d borrowed. Maebh’s
insisting
she go was even harder to accept.

He wondered if the Elder was enjoying this, knowing Ronan had gotten what he wanted, only to lose his sister’s company during the ceremony. When she told the younglings, he had been flooded with relief. He remembered Mara’s first ceremony, only a few seasons after his own, and the happiness he’d seen on her face after her first change. Ronan wanted her to see that happen to the younglings; he wanted her to finally understand the joy that helping to raise her had brought him. He wanted her to be there when they saw the younglings’ human faces for the first time.

Unbidden, his mind brought up the image of Aine’s smile when she first shed her skin.

His fists tightened again. Mara should be at his side tonight, to witness this, to help keep them safe.

Instead, she was with a human. Ronan had pointed out the irony of it to Maebh, that Mara was the one leaving instead of him. But when a great wave of sadness had flooded into him through their link, he’d stopped speaking.

Maebh had quietly asked him to prepare the island for the younglings’ arrival. Then she’d turned, covered herself in her skin, and swum to where Mara and the younglings played out beyond Whale Rock.

What preparing the island meant, he wasn’t sure. They chose Appledore for the ceremony because all the humans would flock to Star that night for the dance, and Appledore offered a rocky inlet that couldn’t be seen from the hotel. It was a harsh shore without soft grasses or sand, but on this first ceremony since Aine’s kidnapping, Ronan put safety before any other concern.

He found thirteen broken bottles in the tide pools between the rocks. He ripped the other sleeve off Noah’s shirt, wrapped it around his hand, and gathered up the glass shards. They glittered green and brown and sharp. He took the glass to the other side of the island and scattered it on the lawn, where it would have a better chance of slicing open some human foot. It was their trash, after all, and he thought they should pay for their own sins.

There were small pink crabs in the tide pools too. Ronan picked up one the size of his palm and crushed its shell between his teeth. He sucked out the soft, quivering flesh. He gathered more crabs into one large pool for the younglings to eat after the ceremony. They had been fasting for two days, to make the change easier, and shedding their skins would make them hungrier still. The crabs would be the first food their human mouths would taste.

Ronan heard voices coming from behind him, near the Center. He abandoned the tide pools, not wanting to draw attention to the ceremony site. As quickly as Noah’s too-tight clothes would let him, he loped away from the shore and up the hill, toward the Thaxter gardens. He often saw humans admiring the flowers, and he hoped his presence would go unnoticed there.

He walked past the rosebushes, breathing the pollen-fogged air. The colors and textures in this land garden were dry and boring, nothing compared to the kelp forests he roamed underwater. He leaned over to feign interest in a yellow rose, and the humans let him be. They walked past him to the pier and filed into a motorboat that groaned under their weight. They pressed together, laughing, and the boat puttered toward Star.

Ronan walked cautiously up to the Center itself. He skulked past the front door, peered into windows, and listened for movement inside. He cased the building three times before he could assure himself that it was empty, and by then it was nearly dusk. The sun and its harsh light were fading, and soon the moon would rise. It was almost time.

Ronan returned to the inlet, still listening for humans. He heard only the whispers of the water and wind, and the faint bustle of preparation coming from Star.

The ocean doused the last shreds of sunlight. Standing in the blue darkness, Ronan sent Maebh his confidence that the island was ready, that she could bring the younglings here. A few minutes later, he saw a trail of smooth dark heads bobbing toward him through the water.

After five years of silence and stillness and hiding, the pod would start to grow again. He was ready.

twenty-five

L
O
insisted he wear the dark blue button-down shirt, and Noah eventually complied. “Indigo,” she called it. Mom had gotten it for him on his last birthday, but he’d never worn it. Noah liked neutral colors that let him blend in with his surroundings. Or green. Green was okay. But this color was rich and dark, and the fabric wasn’t quite normal—it had a sort of fine-woven sheen to it. It made him stand out. He’d never considered that a particularly good thing.

I don’t know,
he thought, standing in front of the bedroom mirror. He pulled at his cuffs, trying to smooth out the wrinkles in his sleeves. The color made the white T-shirt he wore underneath look very, very white. He knew that just meant he’d spill something on it soon.

“Hi, Mara,” he said to the mirror. He rolled his eyes at himself. He tugged at his shirt one last time, straightened his shoulders, and left the room.

The downstairs looked empty, but Noah heard the discomfiting sound of girlish giggles coming from behind the bathroom door. He recognized Lo’s high-pitched titter, which he’d always found so annoying, and the aged softness of Gemm’s voice. The third laugh, low and even, he’d only recently come to appreciate.

He glanced at his watch. Even prom hadn’t made him this nervous.
You’re being stupid.
It’s just a party.

“Are you out there, Noah?” The bathroom door muffled Gemm’s voice.

“Just waiting on you,” he called back. Had he sounded too impatient? He walked to the sofa and sat down, trying to figure out whether his legs would be crossed or uncrossed if he were actually waiting there patiently.

Gemm came out first, her gray hair done up in curls and old-fashioned red lipstick on her thinning lips. “I taught them a few tricks,” she said, beaming. She glanced a bit wistfully at her old advertisements on the wall, but she kept smiling.

Lo followed Gemm. She wore a loose, boxy black dress that made her look like a walking rectangle, and her hair was slicked back in a low bun. She’d contoured her eyes with thick, dark liner.

Mara appeared next, smoothing her hands over her short hair. Her dress was a deep, liquid green, with a flowing skirt that ended just at her knees. Her cheeks and forehead were tinged with silvery pink, but he couldn’t tell if it was makeup or a blush.

Gemm winked at her, and Mara sighed and slowly turned around. The back of her dress dipped very low, exposing the smooth curve of her back. Nestled in her hair was a headband of small, creamy pearls.

Gemm leaned over Noah. “You’re staring,” she whispered.

He felt his face burn.

“Did you see her stockings? It’s sort of an inside joke.”

Mara wore fishnets. She glanced at Gemm and plucked at them with nervous, manicured fingers.

Noah raked his hands back through his hair, then panicked when he remembered Lo’s careful styling from that afternoon. He looked over at her, and she grinned.

“It looks better your way,” she said.

The compliment brought Noah back to himself. “You look nice too.” He took a step toward Mara. “And you look, um, really nice.”
Gorgeous,
he thought, but he was pretty sure he shouldn’t say it. They had never said this was a date—he didn’t know if selkies even had dates.

“Thank you,” she said. “Dolores and Lo were so kind, lending me all these things.”

The three of them exchanged smiles. Noah felt a brief surge of jealousy for the easy bond they shared.

“I can’t see why you won’t wear the sash, Lo,” Mara said. “It looked beautiful.”

Gemm nodded.

Lo’s lips trembled, and Noah feared they were in for another hunger-induced tantrum. But she looked from Gemm to Mara, inclined her head, and said quietly, “I guess I could try it again.”

Mara clapped and went back into the bathroom, returning with a shining length of white silk.

Gemm took it from her and wrapped it around Lo’s waist, tying it in a cascading bow at the back. She retreated a few steps and smiled.

It was startling—instead of a fabric box, Lo was wearing a real dress. A pretty dress.

“Very Audrey Hepburn,” Gemm said. “You look lovely—you all do.”

Mara sighed. “I wish I could dress like this more,” she said. “I love your clothes, Lo.” She spun around, and her skirt lifted out in a circle.